Rita Blanca, little white river, was a name Spanish sheepherders gave a stream here in the nineteenth century. The XIT Ranch took it for one of its pasture divisions, and it spread to other places in the corner of the Panhandle. When the XIT sold off its land in the early 1900s, homesteaders plowed the shortgrass for wheat.
In the 1930s that plowed ground blew away in the Dust Bowl. Congress gave the government authority to buy failed cropland in 1933 and 1935, and the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 put the purchases under the Soil Conservation Service to rebuild the soil and replant the grass. The tracts around Texline became the Rita Blanca National Grassland, about 93,000 acres in Dallam County and neighboring Cimarron County, Oklahoma, most of it in Texas, now run by the Cibola National Forest with the Kiowa grasslands in New Mexico.
It is not one block of land but many tracts among private ranches, at 3,700 to 4,700 feet. Ranchers graze cattle on it under permit. Pronghorn, prairie dogs, coyotes and hawks live on the shortgrass, and a Forest Service study counted 826 kinds of plants on the Kiowa and Rita Blanca grasslands. The places to stop are the Thompson Grove and Felt picnic sites, popular rests for travelers crossing the plains between Texline and Clayton, New Mexico.
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Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour